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If you read contemporary reviews of Dracula, you'll find it was critically panned by the average reader. Some of the other names of the day considered it a sleeper classic but otherwise the real cultural value of Dracula comes from its Hammer incarnations. Which is entirely understandable, as the weight of Stoker's laborious prose prevents any sort of impression to form in the reader's mind beyond the desire to sleep – or strangle the heroines for their stupidity.

In some sense I wish Dracula from the page had had more of an impact than the cinematic Dracula. The heavy mustache, the fierce Stygian features...they make for a much for evocative vampiric archetype than what we've in fact been left with.

Imba phoenix brutalises poor enslaved snake so the climax can be carelessly stuffed into an editor's wordcount intray. We didn't even get to see the mandrakes suffer with the nihilistic dread of early adulthood!

This is a strange book. I don't mean it has endearing quirks or interesting oddball ideas – it's strange because the writing is irregular in tone and quality, the pacing erratic, the settings somehow clear yet myopic, rambling. Not bad per se, but definitely adventurous down the wrong fork in the road.

It's a book about a self-loathing and reads like an extended greentext. The author drags you through his demented world as if he's recanting the events to a therapist, complete with the expectation that you'll pick through the narrated wreckage and refrain from kicking him out in disgust.

Not that your disgust should be very visceral, that is. The infantile “beatdowns” delivered in the first half of the novel were so glib as to be almost not worth the space they take up. A simple “I like abusing women – that's the premise” would have been as effective.

As for the entire ending scene...if you were able to cultivate any sort of emotional response from beneath the author's hack affectations (switching to second-person? stripping dialogue? why, to illustrate his mental haze and absurd paranoia? He's sober for god's sake!) and bizarre chain of events, you would probably be left thinking...is that it? Is that all they can muster? He hurts them and they stage weird pantomimes about his manhood and spike his drinks? Why are there so many people just hanging around like villainous stooges, laughing like extras in a comedy?

The narrator is 35 or thereabouts by the time the novel ends, but I'm betting Anonymous is in his early twenties. If you want to real novel about sexist misanthropy read Mishima's Forbidden Colours instead.

Good Evening, Mrs Craven is a collection of morose little stories about the left behind well-to-do of England during WW2.

Panter-Downes' style is economical and aphoristic, describing the bucolic scenes with an emotive, painterly delicacy, though terse and minimalist; focus is instead given to character dialogue and internal monologuing. Her prose clearly reproduces English dialects in a delightful, and highly readable, manner.

In the epilogue, it is mentioned that some critics back home in England had felt the stories falsely represented the realities of the war for the majority of the country, who were suffering enormously more than the dotty old madams. This makes sense, given that Panter-Downes' stories focused on the stranded English gentry as they were evaporating beneath the weight of the frequently mentioned ‘social revolution' occuring at the time. However, the author was, after all, asked by her American editor (as she wrote for the New Yorker) to keep writing about larny British ladies in their drafty country houses because thats what the Manhattanites wanted to read. Her depiction of idyllic upper-crust English society was what cemented her fame across the Atlantic, though perhaps it is the historical value of her writing, with its touching prose and quaint cast, that has cemented Good Evening, Mrs Craven's legacy.

One story in particular stood out to me: a woman who longed for the closeness and comradeship that the airr aids had forced into her stilted, austere English life. Her loneliness and attempts to strike up friendship were rendered in soft, heartbreaking prose. It is this scalpel-fine examination of human emotion - without tending towards the clinical - that I appreciated most of all.

In short: achingly poor writing sustaining a sometimes exciting plot. However the Moties (despite being utterly humanoid, which, for a work of speculative fiction should really be considered a faux pas, or at least a tut-tut) were often a joy to listen to chatter, especially the three ambassadors at the draw of the novel, who provided more insight into the Motie psyche than the however-many-snippets of dialogue that came before. Definitely a side-eye thrown at the expressive interjectional use of “rape” though.